Numerous methods are known for the closing of beverage and food containers. Such containers are composed of various material such as paper, plastic or glass. Generally, these containers are cylindrical with a circular open end for drinking or removing the contents thereof. Various pre-sized caps or covers are known and often used to cover these containers. Such covers can be merely pressed onto the top of the container after the filling thereof. More recently, heat shrinkable film has been used, particularly in the mass production of fill containers. Generally, for such usage, the same size container is always capped. Other attemps have been made to incorporate more flexibility into heat-shrinkable film capping apparatuses. However, such apparatuses suffer from various limitations such as slow recycle time, the ability to cap only a single size container without substantial adjustment of the machine, the requirement of specially prepared films such as a rigid or precut film, lack of adaptability to the fast-food service industry and the like shortcomings.
There has been a significant incentive for perfecting an apparatus to accomplish a capping operation using an uncut supply roll of film because such a capping procedure would have a cost advantage of one-fifth to one-tenth that of preformed covers.
It is therefor an object of the present invention to provide an apparatus which is highly reliable and utilizes a very short recycle time.
It is another object of the present invention to provide an apparatus which is capable of capping containers of various sizes without adjustment to the apparatus.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide an apparatus which can utilize various types of flexible, heat shrinkable film without the requirement of pre-sizing or pre-cutting.
It is yet a further object of the present invention to provide an apparatus and method for capping containers at a fraction of the cost of preformed covers.
These and other objects of the present invention will become readily apparent from the description of the invention which follows.